My son is in the Cub Scouts and wanted to build a “Star Power Mario Car” for the pinewood derby. There are a lot awards other than fastest that you can pickup so I decided to go for style points. I used a Tinket, Bluefuirt and Neopixel strips from Adafruit and basically combined this and this tutorial.

It worked great for the judge but during the actual race the neopixels weren’t working. I think didn’t have enough power going to them.

In the summer of 2014 the Fossil team came to the Prototype Studio to help them build a prototype of what would later be called the Fossil Q. It’s a wearable device that looks like a normal watch or bracelet and would be sold in the existing jewelry counters of department stores. The Prototype Studio had 2 jobs, define the technical constraints the creative teams would have to work around and build an early working version using the devices provided by their hardware partner Intel.

It turned out at the time that the Intel hardware was not quite ready to be sent to us so we had our own board built with the same features the Intel hardware had, we hollowed out an existing Fossil watch and put the board in that. This allowed us and the client to put the watch on and tightly iterate on what the features did and how it worked. It also allowed us to understand the constraints of developing a product like this in iOS and we could work with the creative team to come up with solutions around those constraints.

Eventually the Intel hardware was delivered and we swapped that in. This gave us a great starting place to test the capabilities of the Intel hardware and it’s SDK. Then once we were sure we’d be able to provide a great user experience around the hardware a development team was created to build the consumer facing Android and iOS apps. Then almost a year later the Fossil Q was launched.

Because of the nature of prototypes I don’t get to work on things that are actually released to the public very often but this is an application we built that anyone with an iPhone can actually download. It’s an audio tour app for our Lincoln Center client. One of the major challenges here was releasing an app chock full of content with a download size under 100 meg. But now my swift and interface builder constraint skills are strong….so very strong.

UPDATE: Looks like the client pulled it from the app store to button up a few things.

We prototyped out a beacon experience with MasterCard’s Priceless Surprises campaign. The client liked it so much they decided to deploy it during the Northside festival (June 12th-19th 2014). The project was even written up in Fast Company:

We built in beacon-enabled Priceless Surprises into the existing Northside iPhone app that attendees would have downloaded. As they walked around the festival they would get a notification that they received a Priceless Surprise where they were then given free tickets to a concert at the festival. The beacons are a relatively new technology and building a consumer experience around them was…challenging.

Vital Score is an iPad app that you use while in the doctor’s office to quickly asses how healthy you are. I built a phase 1 and phase 2 prototype for them over the course of a few months. They installed the prototype if a few Dr offices and did some user testing. It initially integrated with a Withings scale but we switch to a Pally scale. The Pally scale allowed us to directly connect to the scale via Bluetooth witch allowed for a much better user experience. We then hired an agency to continue development to add user login and roll this out to more doctors.
nbsp;http://vitalscorehealth.com/

After getting into a conversation with a coworker about the e-cigarette we decided to take it upon ourselves to create the first ever connected e-cigarette. We hooked up an Arduino to the e-cig and created a companion iPhone application that showed the user how much money he was saving and how many minutes he added to his life. We also had it tweet out every time he went through a theoretical pack of cigarettes. We had a event at the local bar where he used the device all night and now we can say that we created the first connected e-cigarette (as far as Google is concerned). It even got picked up my some news sites.

Miyamo was my first real production iOS app. I was the Technical Lead for the development team. We built an iOS app as well as a Facebook app. The idea was that it would read your music listening tastes and create a flower that represented it. It was released in the app store in Mexico and nothing really happened to it since. But it worked great and looked beautiful.